Decode UTF8 symbols

Question

I have a string in swift:

let flag = "Cattì ò"

I am trying to convert the UTF8 symbols.

I have tried using

stringByRemovingPercentEncoding

but noting changes. How can I convert the symbols properly ?

Answer 1

Welcome to the encoding guessing game! Look like somewhere along the pathway, your string didn't get the correct code page. Here's one way to guess it:

let flag = "Cattì ò"

let encodings = [NSASCIIStringEncoding,
    NSNEXTSTEPStringEncoding,
    NSJapaneseEUCStringEncoding,
    NSUTF8StringEncoding,
    NSISOLatin1StringEncoding,
    NSSymbolStringEncoding,
    NSNonLossyASCIIStringEncoding,
    NSShiftJISStringEncoding,
    NSISOLatin2StringEncoding,
    NSUnicodeStringEncoding,
    NSWindowsCP1251StringEncoding,
    NSWindowsCP1252StringEncoding,
    NSWindowsCP1253StringEncoding,
    NSWindowsCP1254StringEncoding,
    NSWindowsCP1250StringEncoding,
    NSISO2022JPStringEncoding,
    NSMacOSRomanStringEncoding,
    NSUTF16StringEncoding,
    NSUTF16BigEndianStringEncoding,
    NSUTF16LittleEndianStringEncoding,
    NSUTF32StringEncoding,
    NSUTF32BigEndianStringEncoding,
    NSUTF32LittleEndianStringEncoding]

for encoding in encodings {
    if let bytes = flag.cStringUsingEncoding(encoding),
        flag_utf8 = String(CString: bytes, encoding: NSUTF8StringEncoding) {
        print("\(encoding): \(flag_utf8)")
    }
}

The array contains all the encodings that Cocoa supports.

From the results, it seems like your string was encoded in NSISOLatin1StringEncoding (a.k.a ISO-8859-1), the default encoding for HTML 4.01. This gives Cattì ò in UTF-8, not exactly match your desired result but is the closest among all code pages.

Other good candidates are NSWindowsCP1252StringEncoding and NSWindowsCP1254StringEncoding so I'd suggest you check with other strings.